Sunday, December 6, 2015

“Academician” Or “Academic”? Q and A on Nigerian English Errors and Usage

Although
many Nigerians, including Professor Wole Soyinka, use “academicians” and
“academics” interchangeably, they are in error. Find out why in today’s Q and A.
Also find the difference between a “house” and a “home,” between the
expressions “it’s me” and “it’s I,” and other usage questions.

Question:

What
is the difference between an “academic” and an “academician”? I see both words
used interchangeably in Nigerian English. Is this correct?

Answer:

Let
me answer you this way: you will probably never have a reason to use the word “academician”
if you speak or write Standard English. Most people who use “academician” are
either non-native English speakers or uneducated native English speakers.

So
what is the difference between an “academician” and an “academic”? Well, an
“academic” is someone who teaches or conducts research in a higher educational
institution, typically in a university. In British and Nigerian English,
academics are also called “lecturers.” In American English, they are called
“professors.”

An “academician,” on the other hand, is a person
who works with or is honored with membership into an academy, that is, an
institution devoted to the study and advancement of a specialized area of
learning such as the arts, sciences, literature, medicine, music, engineering,
etc. Examples of academies are the Nigerian Academy of Letters, the Royal
Academy of Arts, the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal Academy of Engineering,
the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, the National
Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, etc.

Not
all academics are academicians and not all academicians are academics. In other
words, you can teach in a university, polytechnic, college of education, etc.
and never be made a member of an academy, and you can become a member of an
academy without ever being a teacher or a researcher at a higher educational
institution. Note that while most academicians are also academics, most
academics are never academicians.

A
little note on pragmatics is in order here. Although many dictionaries have
entries that say “academician” and “academic” can be synonymous, this isn’t
really the case in actual usage, at least among educated native English
speakers. It is considered illiterate usage in British and American English to
call higher education teachers and researchers “academicians”; they are
properly called “academics.” Many dictionaries merely capture the entire range
of a word’s usage without discriminating socially prestigious usage from
uneducated or archaic usage.

That
is why I was disappointed when Professor Wole Soyinka used “academician” as if
it meant “academic” in a 1971 newspaper article. In the article, he wrote:
“What I would have expected of an academician was the advocation [sic,
“advocation” is an archaic variant of “advocacy”] of a social system whereby
the life of a decent [living] was guaranteed and the benevolent patronage of
the privileged groups was eradicated for all time.

“Dr
Isong’s cry if any should be directed against a social system which binds both
him and his dependants in a vice of mutual degradation and limits his freedom
of action and development by denying him equality in his association with all
the potential inherent in every class of society” (quoted in James Gibbs and
Bernith Lindfors (1993), Research on Wole
Soyinka, pp. 243-244).

Dr.
A. J. Isong, whom Soyinka called an
“academician,” wasn’t a member of an academy; he was an “academic,” that is, a
lecturer, at the University of Ibadan. I think it helps to point out that
“academic” is derived from “academia” (pronounced aki/deemia) or “academe”
(pronounced aki/deem), which means a place of (higher) learning such as a
university or, as the Online Etymology Dictionary puts it, “the world of
universities and scholarship.” “Academician,” on the other hand, is derived
from “academy” (pronounced as “aka-demi”), which is an institution dedicated to
the pursuit of advancement in a narrowly defined field of knowledge.

Henry
Watson Fowler, the famous English lexicographer who wrote A Dictionary of Modern English Usage and co-wrote the Concise Oxford Dictionary, pointed out
that although Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Lowell used “academe” as a poetic
variant of “academy,” it is a mistake do so in conventional usage.

In
sum, don’t call anybody an “academician” if the person doesn’t work in an
academy. It’s actually rare to come across an academician. That’s why I said
earlier that you will probably never have a reason to use the word—if you want
to use it correctly, that is.

Question:

I am
a regular reader of your columns in the weekend editions of Daily Trust. My question to you is do "house"
and "home” mean the same thing or are they different?

Answer:

A “house”
is merely a building where someone lives while a “home” is a house we have an
emotional attachment to. It is the sense of comfort and emotional connection we
feel toward a house that makes it a home. You build a house and make it a home
by occupying it and filling it with memories. So a building is the structure,
the concrete, while a home is a combination of the building and the emotions,
memories, sense of belonging, and comfort that we bring to the house.

While
this distinction is generally true, it is worth noting that American English
speakers, especially real estate agents, often use “home” in ways that are
similar to the traditional meaning of a “house.” They say things like
"homes for sale," "buy a home." Well, traditional
grammarians would say you can't buy a home; you can only buy a house and make
it a home.

Question:

Is
the expression “the both of us” standard? Or it is Nigerian English?

Answer:

It’s
neither nonstandard nor uniquely Nigerian English. Several grammarians say the
expression first emerged in American English as a deviation from the
conventional “both of us,” but I have never heard any American in my social
circles use the expression; most of them simply say “both of us.” The article “the”
in the expression strikes me as pointless.

Nevertheless
British music sensation Adele in her recent wildly popular, record-breaking
song titled “Hello” said “the both of us.” This either means that “the both of
us” has crossed over to the UK or Adele’s English has become Americanized. The
latter seems more likely since Adele, who now lives in the US, sounds really
American in accent and diction in her new song.

Question:

When
someone asks you “who is it?” which of these responses is correct? “It is I.”
“It is me.”

Answer:

From
a pragmatic point of view, both responses are grammatically acceptable. In
formal grammar, however, “it is I” would be considered the only grammatically
correct response. The responder is the subject of the sentence, and “I” is a
subjective pronoun—just like “we,” “he,” “she,” “they,” etc. are subjective
pronouns. Subjective pronouns initiate action in a sentence. To understand why
“It is I” is considered the only grammatically acceptable response, recast the
sentence. For instance, you would say “I am the one,” not “Me is the one.”

Having
said that, it is worth noting that almost no one says “It is I” in
conversational English anywhere in the English-speaking world. The conventional
usage is “It is me.” You may find “It is I” only in formal, written contexts.
Many grammarians say “It is I” is on its way out of the English language, and I
agree.

Question:

Kindly
say something about the use of “her,” “she,” and “it” in talking about a
country or a group. My assumption is expressions like "Nigeria and her
allies" and "NUJ protects her members" are old fashioned, and
now better put as "Nigeria and its allies" and "NUJ protects its
members" respectively. But a friend thinks the latter are incorrect
expressions. Please comment.

Answer:

I
wrote about this some time ago. Yes, the use of feminine pronouns such as “she”
or “her” to refer to a country or to an organization or to a ship is outdated.
The pronoun “it” is now preferred to “she” or “her” when reference is made to
countries or organizations. You will never find contemporary native English
speakers say “Britain and her citizens” or “America and her interests”; they’d
replace “her” with “it.”

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.